Headlines were made on Tuesday when Arsenal released a statement announcing that Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had been stripped of the club captaincy.
It followed the his from the team on Saturday for the match against Southampton after returning late from a trip abroad, with manager Mikel Arteta confirming that it was for a disciplinary breach.
While some argued that it was a welcome admission of honesty from the manager, others would have preferred some falsehood, and that an explanation that he was suffering from illness would have sufficed to explain his absence.
Arteta’s predecessor Arsène Wenger used the excuse of mystery back injuries to explain players being omitted from squads. Had it been true, the waiting rooms of London hospitals would have been full of Arsenal players awaiting treatment!
For these people, they believe such matters should be kept in house, and that dirty laundry should not be aired in public.
Noble as such sentiments are, the world has moved on. Nowadays, social media is ubiquitous and nearly everyone has a camera phone. That means that if a well-known figure is out later than they should be, they are caught with someone else's partner, or is slightly the worse the wear for a night out, there are odds of their photos appearing on social the next morning and getting picked up by the mainstream media as well.
Photos of Aubameyang visiting a Barcelona tattooist to explain his absence last week have already been posted. The fact that this was from a previous visit was irrelevant, and the truth must not be allowed to stand in the way of a good story!
In reality, it is impossible to keep such a story secret anymore because the truth will out. It is far better to get ahead of the story, agree a communication strategy and deal with it.
This means that while it will be headlines for a day, the feeding frenzy will quickly exhaust itself and move on to new prey.
They used to say that today’s headlines will be fish and chip paper tomorrow. In the age of social media, they may not even have that long a shelf life.